If we believe this little plot blurb, there’s a whole lot here that I hadn’t even guessed at: parallel dimensions, humanoid robots and a plot that jumps from the 60s to today.

But it does feature Tomorrowland.

Here’s the blurb:

A teenage girl, a genius middle-aged man (who was kicked out of Tomorrowland) and a pre-pubescent girl robot attempt to get to and unravel what happened to Tomorrowland, which exists in an alternative dimension, in order to save Earth.

HitFix expand on this. The middle aged man is called Frank and will be played by George Clooney. Frank was kicked out of Tommorowland when he was just 11 years old by the nasty Nix. This is Hugh Laurie‘s role and unless there are some ageing effects planned, I expect he’s going to be a robot too. Seems on-message as much as anything else.

Nix has been in charge of Disneyland for many years, and he’s become rotten, corrupt. Athena, unchanged since Frank was a young man, plays a key role in the film, and the hero is a girl named Casey who has a quick scientific mind that becomes important as the story unfolds. Nix is a guy who values technical accomplishment over creative thinking, and when he throws Frank out of Tomorrowland, he’s not alone. Every creative thinker is banished, allowing Nix to focus purely on aesthetics and technical advancement for its own sake.

Okay, I can see how the man who made Ratatouille would get hooked on this idea. Remember his critique of critics? Bird has ideas about creativity and aesthetics – that he likes to express creatively and aesthetically.

This whole idea is still pretty mysterious to my mind. I can’t quite connect these dots. Tomorrowland is both in Disneyland but also a parallel dimension? So where does this story take place? Is Nix’s corrupt Disneyland going to look and behave like the one we all know now? What would that mean?

It’s a surprising move to have the villain be the puppet master behind Disneyland but let’s see if this ends up being a subversive film at all. I can’t expect we’ll ever get Tomorrowland and Escape From Tomorrrow mixed up, but could they have overlapping concerns?

So, still far more questions than answers. We could yet be in for eighteen more months of head scratching ahead of the film’s December 2014 release. Fun!